M - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

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F or the last eighteen years, Art Orienté Objet (Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoit Mangin) have put forth several poetic and surprising projects resulting from their experimentations and which reveal our behaviors as we face our existence and the environment. Their works take on various aesthetic forms (installations, objects, videos and/or photographs) in which we find a familiar animal presence and a staging of their own existence. Over the years, the French couple, throughout their creativity process, have managed to entangle human and animal together, in order to understand the stakes of our problematic relationship with the environment. If one examins their works, it becomes visible that from the beginning of their collaboration, Laval-Jeantet and Mangin specifically focused their attention on the concept of territory as called into question by the pet… Brand new! Get that lived-in animality in your home now! is a “subscription to animality kit” realized in 1991. Regarding this artwork, the couple explained that: “At the time, we shared our living space with nearly twenty cats. We were immersed in animality so that we began coating the legs of some furniture with the essential oil of valerian to encourage the cats to scratch them. As a result, these pieces of furniture endured damages which, for the cats, were merely the marking out of their territories within a human territory. In the form of a commercially available kit, these pieces of furniture questioned the space of culture and animality within us. They became an anticipatory vision of a world where animality would be banished or at least would subsist as a conditioned trace of its former self.” The Happy Hen A few years later, the two artists were led by their research to extend their investigations from the domestic sphere to the one of the wild. A Pioneer World and Pioneer Ark’s presentation sums up this part: “In 1999, we went to Australia to prepare Signs of Life in Melbourne. This stay was an opportunity to get to know a farm that is called the Pioneer Farm. This farm is a gathering place for animal victims that have suffered from mutations due to human activity (toxic chemical and radioactive pollutants) as well as naturally occurring spontaneous factors that are more or less inexplicable. Our observation of this conscientious collection by scientists of animals that have suffered the effects of mutation and our knowledge of studies in genetics, led us to conceive of two complementary artworks that present this very real phenomenon: A Pioneer World, which presents a scientific diorama placed in front of a large map of what the world would look like if the polar ice cap were to melt and the sea level were to rise a few meters; and Pioneer Ark, a large hanging mobile representing a contemporary Noah’s ark in which ecological urgencies are inscribed within an aesthetic of competition. 80 These artworks present porcelain transgenic animals inhabiting a microcosm where the observations of a world manipulated by humans and their science are concentrated. They hinge upon the aesthetic fascination provided by science and the beauty of animals. By presenting modified organisms, they open the way for a poetic digression and a dreamlike aesthetic that highlights the ambiguity of the metamorphoses of our time.” The Year my Voice Broke During their eighteen years of working together, Laval- Jeantet and Mangin, departed from the pet to the domestic animal, and then to wildlife, and in the end, to environment. We can also notice that the two modes of plastic art expression Steve Baker defined as the tools of the postmodern animal definition, mark out the path of Art Orienté Objet : The Happy Hen is an example of “botched taxidermy”, as well as the furs of Roadkill Coat, the knits of The Year my Voice Broke, etc. It seems that following the couple’s tracks leads us straight into the field of the postmodern animal as Steve Baker depicted it. Which field is that? How do they mix human and animal territories? Why looking into the domestic animal, the sources of the wild animal’s denaturing? Answering this question implies “to take an interest in the animal’s cultural construction.”(1) Examining the wild and the domestic domains leads us to look into the phenomenon of domestication. Paleontologists agree about this process’ origins to take place in the Neolithic era, when in the cradle of the West, humans turned from being hunters into breeders. In order to explain how the domestic era began, Jean- Denis Vigne, a paleontologist specialized in domestication, relies on Jacques Cauvin’s remarks: “inside hunters communities, man perceives himself as the equal of animals, plants and natural elements, through a horizontal perception of the universe. (2) (3) With colonizing new territories and domesticating, man establishes a vertical hierarchy and assumes the right to dominate nature, even including mammals which are his closest parents”. The paleontologist goes further adding that, from that moment, humans took the liberty to depict themselves in their art whereas, beforehand, it only represented animal shapes. Thus domestication certainly brought about the change of paradigms, propitious to various mutations, which themselves contributed over the course of history, to pull out the individual from nature, but also to durably evade the animal issue. An example of these mutations takes part in Elisabeth de Fontenay’s book, le silence des bêtes, la philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité, published in 1999. She explains how, following the Neolithic’s revolutions, the emerging humanism of Greek philosophy durably subtended the Western societies’ construction and, at the same time the deconstructing of the animal,
Art Orienté Objet Bwiti Turning, 2003 � Art Orienté Objet throughout history: it is introduced as being the driving force of the ontological breach qualifying our relationship to animals, which key-mutation relates to sacrificial practices between ancient paganism and Christianity. First of all, according to the philosopher, the crucifixion as founding principle of Christianity was in fact an ingestion of the old sacred triad of men, beasts and ancient gods. Incorporating the Agnus Dei to the Christian sacrifice gave birth to the Holy Trinity, founder of the “canonical principle of individualization by which we became divided subjects: master of exteriority and of our own interiority.” (4) Moreover according to Elisabeth de Fontenay, the Christian god, allowing all animal-eating with no process, opened the way to an unrestricted exploitation, of which the current food-processing industry is undoubtedly our most shameful inheritance… Religious ceremonies, coming with Christians all along their history, were the vectors enabling this principle to set up. These ceremonies persisted through modern age, in what Louis Althusser brought into light about psychoanalysis in 1964: “psychoanalysis […] deals with […] the only war with no recollection or memorials that humanity pretends having ever waged; the one she always thought winning in advance, basically because humanity exists for having ever waged; the one she always thought winning in advance, basically because 81 humanity exists for having survived it, for living and for keeping on giving birth to itself, as a culture within human culture: a constant war made inside each one of its offspring who, […] everyone for himself in loneliness and against death, are forced to go all the way on the path that will turn them from mammal seeds into human infants subjects” (5) If this entire course is forced, then none if its journey is irreparably constituent of the individuals who comprise it. How to reverse the process in this case? The two artists of Art Orienté Objet share the feature of coming across domains and search tools, with the present thinkers of the animal question: Bwiti turning refers to an “ethnopsychiatry” experiment; Bad trip is tinged with a strange psychological aspect… Where does their approach lead us to? Que le panda vive en moi is a project of performance for artists planning on being injected with genetically modified panda blood, which mixes medicine genetic engineering, art and environmental concerns, but most probably, psychology and anthropology too. With this artistic act, are we not at the edge of the “Sorcerer‘s” appearance haunting Steve Baker’s book ? We met with the artists to discuss their work. The Ecosystem kit (Brand new! Get that lived-in animality in your home now!) deals with the
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Antennae Issue 10 - Summer 2009 ISS
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T his issue of Antennae is fully de
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‘Y ou don’t need a Ph.D. in lin
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Simon Starling Kakteenhaus, 2002, V
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BEYOND CLASSIC FIELD BIOLOGY: BATRA
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Brandon Ballengée DFA 83, Karkinos
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empathy in viewers. The intention i
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Brandon Ballengée The Ever Changin
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investigations; for example, explor
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F ood production, energy consumptio
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W hat is a Translocal Curator? We u
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The feminist challenge to patriarch
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O ver the last several decades, the
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Julian Montague The Stray Shopping
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Page 39 and 40: Todd Gilens Top images: Waiting at
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Page 43 and 44: MAINTAINING A GREEN NEWS AGENDA Thi
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Page 47 and 48: CAPE FAREWELL: THE ULTIMATE JOURNEY
Page 49 and 50: David Hinton Director David Hinton
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Page 55 and 56: Which brings me back to what origin
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Page 79: Art Orienté Objet have been creati
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Page 85 and 86: Art Orienté Objet The Happy Hen, 2
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